Trauma
by minimonster12345
Summary: I end up with red eyes, my cheeks wet with the tears that won't stop flowing, curled into a ball, whimpering and yelling. Yelling for him to stop, to leave me alone, telling him that he's hurting me. But I'm holding out my arms, trying to protect myself from a ghost. A ghost of the past, that won't leave me alone. He won't stop. /Minor BoO spoilers


**Hey guys! Sorry I haven't been writing lately, I was participating in NaNoWriMo in November, and then I just needed to take a break from writing for a while. So, just to get in the swing of writing fanfiction again, I'm writing this little oneshot to get all my fanfic juices flowing again, and I'll work on all of the stories that were in progress before November. **

**In other news, there will be tiny spoilers about Blood of Olympus in this story, since it has parts of Reyna's backstory in it that were revealed in the book, so if you haven't read it yet and you don't want to be spoiled on that then I recommend that you leave and come back after you've read the book. On with the story!**

_Reyna_

I heard a lot of people use the name in vain. They used it as a way to describe what they felt as they recovered from a war. Most were Greeks, since most Romans have seen it working it's worst on their loved ones.

PTSD, they call it. Not to be confused with regular post-traumatic stress, which is completely normal for someone who's been through a war. PTSD, or Post-traumatic stress _disorder _effects some percent of soldiers in the legion. Maybe they witnessed a friend or colleague die in battle, or maybe they almost died themselves, or maybe they simply watched someone drop dead while fighting.

Either way, it only affects certain people, people who are believed to have an imbalance in their brain that activates the symptoms of the post-traumatic stress after said traumatic event. Except, instead of it lasting a normal period of time, it stays, and it's painful. Painful in a mental way, and sometimes physical if it gets bad.

Now, you don't have to be in a war to have Post-Traumatic stress disorder. It can be anything traumatic that's happened. It can happen to someone who's been in a car crash, someone who's witnessed a death, anything unexpected and absolutely horrifying puts them at risk, despite its association with just soldiers.

When I first got here, I was nothing like I am now. I was small, afraid, and weak. I didn't want to talk to anyone, and I was constantly suspicious of everyone.

Now, I seem to have completely changed, but when I look in the mirror, I can't see anything but the terrified little girl in Puerto Rico, with the pigtails and the white nightgown, locked in her bedroom, dreading the moment that the front door opens.

I'm able to pretend to be okay during the day, and sometimes I really do feel okay, but when I'm alone… it's not the same story.

I try to do paperwork while I'm in my villa, alone. It's a good way to distract myself, but it doesn't always work. Once it starts, I can't stop it.

The insomnia is probably linked to it. I end up with red eyes, my cheeks wet with the tears that won't stop flowing, curled into a ball, whimpering and yelling. Yelling for him to stop, to leave me alone, telling him that he's hurting me. But I'm holding out my arms, trying to protect myself from a ghost. A ghost of the past, that won't leave me alone. He won't stop.

It ends up lasting all night, and I'll either cry myself to sleep or I'll snap out of it when I hear my alarm clock go off.

It happens every night. Every night since Hylla and I left our tiny house, the blood on my hands, staining my dress.

At first, only a couple light sleepers in my cohort knew. They found out the first night I was at Camp Jupiter, and thought they were just nightmares, but when they tried to shake me awake and they realized I was awake, and I was screaming at them to stop hurting me, they knew something was wrong.

One of them ended up going into New Rome and telling a therapist, and I was forced to talk to the therapist. At first I refused to talk about it, afraid of thinking about him at all. I was so adapted to pretending it never happened, telling myself that it wasn't true, that in my head when the shrink asked me about it, my mind immediately denied it.

After a couple sessions, she asked me about my dad, and I cracked. I could barely talk about it with all the sobbing and hiccupping, but she ended up getting the point.

She told me right then and there, after I told her about the flashbacks and the nightmares and the feelings I had about it, denial, guilt, anger, and the loss of any memories besides him coming home every day, that I had PTSD. I didn't understand, of course, and claimed that I had never been in the war before. She laughed, and told me that I had been in a war. That I had been in a war inside my own head that left me damaged, and that I needed to accept the issue and work on moving on to heal the wounds.

I kept seeing the therapist. After a while, she asked me to explain to her how my dad acted. After hearing about his paranoia, anger, and rash behavior, she asked me if he was ever in a war. I told her that he had been, before I was born, and she told me that it was likely that he also had PTSD, and that it was hereditary.

I asked why my sister didn't go through the same things I did, and she told me that maybe she just didn't get the chemical imbalance like I did.

I started climbing up ranks, and I met a friend. He quickly turned into my best friend, and we spent most of the day together, whether we were training or goofing off.

We were elated when we both became praetors. We had worked so hard and it all paid off. We both got our own villas, but we had sleepovers a lot because of all the work we had to do.

I never told him about the PTSD or my dad. All he knew was that I was from Puerto Rico and I lived on Circe's island for a few years.

He got suspicious about the nightmares and me not sleeping, but he never asked about it, he just asked if I was okay.

Then the titan war happened, and my therapist straight out told me that this would damage me more. I got angry at her. I had thought that I was getting better. It seemed like I was. Why shouldn't I be able to fight in a war? I'd worked so hard to get to the position I was in, I couldn't just throw it away because there was a chance I would get worse.

After that, I stopped seeing her. I fought in the war, and I saw people die, but I didn't react to it. I just blocked it out.

At least, that's what I thought it was. Everyone else saw me cracking, but they made sure I stayed okay, even though they didn't know what was going on with me.

Then one day, everything fell apart. He was gone. People told me to calm down, and I tried, but in the back of my head I couldn't let it go.

After months of looking for him, it hit me one day that he was gone. That was my breaking point, I could feel myself shattering, suffocating, and there was nothing I could do but let it happen.

I vividly remember having a panic attack. I was crying and gasping for air, shaking, reaching for something, anything to grab onto.

After that, everyone was uncomfortable. I was the praetor, I set the tone for the whole camp, and if I broke down, everyone knew that it was serious.

A few people held it over my head, namely Octavian. Saying that I shouldn't be praetor if I wasn't mentally strong enough, but that was the least of my worries. I had to force myself to look strong when I felt as if there was nothing else to live for.

I told myself every day that it should've been me. It wasn't fair that Jason could be dead, it should've been me.

Nobody saw what was going on behind the curtains. They didn't see the papers taped on my wall saying that I should be dead, they didn't see me begging and pleading the gods to send him back, or to let me find him wherever he was.

It was then that I realized that I couldn't handle change. I had gotten too comfortable with what I had and it had been pulled out from right under me, just like it always has been.

He came back, and I told myself that I would tell him. I would tell him about my dad, and my mental illness, and I would tell him everything that I kept from him, but it turned out that I would be too busy telling him things he's supposed to already know.

I was scared that his friends could see right through me. What if they could see the fear and the heartbreak in my eyes?

Time passed, and the giant war started and ended. I had hoped that I would die during it. I didn't.

I had gone to the place where my worst nightmares happen. Where I wasn't anything but a girl that had no control over anything.

All I could be was that scared little girl that had bruises all over her body, that flinched whenever she met someone new, that begged her father to stop, to please just stop hitting, to stop hurting.

When it was all over and I stood in front of the mirror in my villa, I couldn't stop seeing her, and I knew that I would never be able to escape her.

It's not my dad that's hurting me anymore, it's me.


End file.
